Iomega Unveils High-end NAS Appliance for SMBs

Iomega on Thursday announced a new high-end network attached storage (NAS) appliance for small and mid-sized businesses (SMB). The StorCenter px12-450r NAS is touted as one of the first to incorporate an Intel Xeon E3-1200 v2 (Ivy Bridge) processor for increased performance with reduced power consumption; most recent models of NAS make use of the Intel Atom processor.

A ground-up redesign of the company's previous top-of-the-line px12-350r model, the StorCenter px12-450r is a 12-bay, 2U network storage array with support for upcoming 4TB disk drives and solid-state drives (SSDs). Disk drive trays are included by default to simplify capacity expansion; administrators need only add new disk drives.

"Designed with the latest Intel processing architecture at its core, Iomega is first to market with the highest performance at the best value available in its class. Built with scalable server class storage," says Mike Nikzad, chief operating officer of Iomega, in a prepared statement. "The StorCenter px12-450r is also designed to support today's cloud and virtualization storage demands while having enough available headroom to meet the future storage and application growth opportunities."

Under the hood, the px12-450r comes with 8GB of memory, which together with its powerful quad-core processor is used to manage multi-threaded storage workloads such as multi-LUN iSCSI, multi-client VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and the bundled Avamar source-based deduplicating agent. Two PCIe slots allow for future expansion by offering additional I/O connectivity with the installation of PCIe 10GbE adapters, while the processor complex itself is user replaceable with the removal of just two thumbscrews.

The px12-450r will also include a new layer of security in the form of McAfee VirusScan Enterprise. Expected to be available in the third quarter of this year, the anti-malware software will perform enterprise-class threat scanning to proactively identify security threats. According to Iomega, the px12-450r is one of the first SMB NASes to support McAfee VirusScan Enterprise natively on hardware.

Iomega says it will add the McAfee VirusScan Enterprise to its other px-Series NAS products, though existing customers will not be able to load the software onto their appliances. Finally, the px12-450r will also be able to run Linux applications created with Iomega's LifeLine Software Development Kit (SDK).

The StorCenter px12-450r NAS is available in diskless and partially populated configurations, and will be sold at a suggested retail price starting at $5,499.99.